1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a facsimile apparatus in which received image information is temporarily stored in a storage medium having a high storage speed, and the image information that has been stored in the storage medium having the high storage speed is transferred to and stored in a storage medium having a low storage speed.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a conventional facsimile apparatus, it is known to use a semiconductor as a storage medium for storing image information. Recently, hard disks and floppy disks, which are non-volatile storage media, have come to be used as the storage media in facsimile apparatus.
A facsimile apparatus which uses a non-volatile storage medium having a low storage speed, such as a floppy disk, is constructed as follows so as not to lower the processing speed of the overall apparatus: Received image information is temporarily stored in a storage medium (hereinafter referred to as a "first storage medium") having a high storage speed, the image information that has been stored in the first storage medium is transferred to a storage medium (hereinafter referred to as a "second storage medium") having a low storage speed, and the transferred image information is stored in the second storage medium.
However, in the conventional facsimile apparatus described above, there are occasions where some or a major part of the image information received by a single communication is not stored in the second storage medium. The reason for this is that blank memory in the second storage medium is used up during the transfer of the image information from the first storage medium to the second storage medium, and therefore all of the image information stored in the first storage medium cannot be stored in the second storage medium.
Further, it is necessary for the first storage medium to store the received image information in succession. As a consequence, if blank memory in the first storage medium is used up, the image information that has already been stored in the first storage medium is successively deleted starting with the oldest information in order to produce blank memory, and newly received image information is stored in this blank memory. Consequently, image information that should be received not only is not stored in the second storage medium but also is not stored in the first storage medium.